


one foot on the platform

by glorious_spoon



Series: Apple Pie Life [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-25
Updated: 2010-09-25
Packaged: 2017-12-15 13:21:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/850010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam is not a man who second-guesses his decisions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	one foot on the platform

Sam is not a man who second-guesses his decisions. He makes a plan, he sticks with it, come Hell or high water (sometimes literally, at least in the first case).  
  
He tells Dean to go to Lisa fully expecting to go down in a blaze of glory, and when it doesn't end quite the way he's expecting, well...he still can't see any reason not to stick to the plan. Dean's just beginning to have a life. Dean has a tough, lovely woman and an awesome kid, and Sam isn't stupid enough to think that everything's going to be just fine right away but he also isn't going to take away the chance--the one fucking chance Dean's ever got--to have something good and ordinary and safe.  
  
Sam's dreams of normal died in the fire with Jess, and Azazel twisted them a long time before that. Dean has a chance. He'll mourn, but he'll survive. If he gets back in the game--  
  
Sam can't deal with that. He just can't. Watching Dean's spirit die by tiny increments over the past year was worse than the taste of Hell he did get.   
  
He deletes Dean's number from his phone--not like he doesn't have it branded on the inside of his skull, but at least that way drunk-dialing him on lonely nights is easier to avoid--and liberates an almost-new Dodge Charger from a shady dealership in Nebraska.   
  
It's good, having his own car. He can organize it the way he wants, notes and photos and maps filed neatly away, iPod hookup for his play-lists, none of which include the greatest hits of 80's metal bands. His artillery is put away in a logical fashion instead of Dean's incomprehensible heap of various deadly items; the only thing he does mimic is the false bottom in the trunk.  
  
He drops in on Bobby, does that whole song and dance, and then hits the road. Bobby agrees with him about Dean. He's been through enough. He needs to get out.  
  
The first time he drives by the house in Indiana to check up on Dean, it's three in the morning and he almost gets caught anyway. Dean's in the driveway, sitting on the hood of the Impala with a bottle of whiskey between his knees. His posture is so slumped and dejected that Sam almost-- _almost_ \--gives in to the impulse to pull over and walk up the driveway and watch the drunken slackness of Dean's face turn into disbelief and then--  
  
\--and then Lisa is walking out of the house. She doesn't look like the pulled-together suburban mom he met, once, a long time ago. She's wearing a bathrobe open over pajama pants and a t-shirt and she settles on the hood of the Impala next to Dean. Sam watches Dean tilt sideways, collapsing against her, head dropping onto her shoulder, and she holds firm. Holds him up.  
  
The Charger's powerful engine revs as he pulls away from the curb. In his rear view mirror, he sees Lisa look up at the sound, but his windows are blacked out and it's not like either of them would recognize this car, anyway.  
  
The second time he drives by, three months later, the Impala is nowhere to be found. There's an old pickup in the driveway, and through the dining room window he can see Dean and Ben at the table, heads bent over a piece of partially-dismembered machinery. Ben points at something, and Dean grins, hands him a socket wrench. His mouth is moving, and while Sam can't hear a word of what he's saying, he can imagine it.  
  
Okay, Sammy, you're gonna want a quarter-inch for this--yeah, that's the one. If it sticks, just give it a yank. It'll go.  
  
Dean's the one who taught him to change the oil and fix the Impala. Dean's the one who taught him to ride a bike, who put up with coaching him through his math homework, who gave him the sex talk when he was eleven. Dean's the one who showed up at his high school graduation even though he thought it was a waste of time.  
  
Dean's the one who left envelopes stuffed with money in his mailbox at Stanford, even when Sam wasn't talking to him.  
  
Sam understands his dad better, now, but that doesn't change the fact that in a lot of the ways that counted, Dean was more of a father to him than John. Ben deserves that, and Sam will not deprive him of it.  
  
When he comes across the Campbells a month later, that's the memory that lets him stand firm against Samuel's insistence that they bring Dean back in.  
  
Sam is sticking to his plan. It's better for everybody involved.

 

***

And now this.  
  
He's expecting--he doesn't know what he's expecting. A hug. A punch, maybe. A gun in the face, questions, shouting, Dean on his feet pulling up the kind of ruckus that only he can manage. When Dean came back, Sam felt like--  
  
 _I was expecting--I don't know, a hug? Some holy water in the face, something!_  
  
There's nothing. Dean looks...calm. He looks Sam up and down, then breathes out a sigh. His brow smooths out. He looks--  
  
Relieved. He looks relieved.  
  
 _So I'm dead? This is heaven? Yellow eyes killed me, and now --_  
  
Sam doesn't second-guess himself. He isn't like Dean.  
  
Most of the time, he thinks that's a good thing.


End file.
